Yesterday I'm out on my evening walk and I see this lady pull into her driveway with her nice car. It's a very short driveway- maybe 40' from the garage to the curb- and it's got a decent upward slope from the street. She stops right in the middle of it and proceeds to take five minutes to get out of the car (WHY do so many people DO THAT???
), engine running, driver's door wide open, and goes to the curbside mailbox to get and sort through and
possibly read all her mail.
WELL in the meantime it becomes evident that she never put the car in
PARK... so while she's in the middle of fiddling with her mail, the car at some point decided to park itself in the garage. When the wide-open driver's door smacked the garage door entrance it let out a helluva slam but that didn't seem to slow the car's forward movement one iota so within seconds the car hit the back of the garage with what sounded like pretty good force.
Yelling out or sprinting over there really would have been pointless as I was too far away to accomplish anything and she probably would have gotten hurt had she tried to dive through the driver's door before it hit the garage. She was lucky (if you can call it that) in one way; there was a shiny new pickup in the two-stall garage already and it didn't get hit.
The moral of the story is: for Gawd's sakes, park that stupid thing and
shut the engine off. You have legs; a 40' walk to the curb isn't gonna kill you or even fatigue you (she had no evident physical disability).
I know I'm preaching to the choir here; I'm contemplating a letter to the local rag with the focal point being excessive idling can be bad.